Passing the Benchmarks

Passing the Benchmarks

After the tweaking and setup phase, the fate of our contestants were sealed. They were not allowed to adjust anything else on their systems and the marshals would now take over control for the next phase and run the competition benchmarks.

The standard benchmarks to be used for the final included a general system performance benchmark PCMark05, Super PI, a processor intensive benchmark and a video encoding test. Two other surprise benchmarks were announced on the day and the two were 3DMark06 and Devil May Cry 4 Demo.

All the marshals were instructed to install and run the benchmarks, while the contestants were allowed to witness at the side. Like before, the systems were ranked from the highest score or the fastest time to complete, depending on the benchmark and allocated points accordingly. In this case, the top position came with 20 points and the last position, 2 points. The total points from these benchmarks were then used to calculate the performance to price ratio which will be the actual result taken. In terms of the overall ranking, this segment will contribute 50% of the final score, the largest proportion of the Iron Tech competition.

There was lots of drama in this phase, with contestants anxiously hoping that their systems would pass the benchmarks. Nevertheless, not all their prayers were answered, especially in the two surprise tests, 3DMark06 and Devil May Cry 4, which garnered the most system crashes. Contestants were allowed another benchmark run after a reboot in the event of a system crash but that was all they were given. It was truly a grueling test of their system stability and performance.

At the end of the day, two competitors, Jeremiah Ong from Singapore and Indonesia's Alva Jonathan emerged as joint winners of this segment, with identical performance to price ratios. They were both awarded the full 100 points from this phase. Thailand's Rangsee Traiwongyoi finished third, slightly edging out Rekky from Indonesia.

Looking through the results, it was clear that these four top scorers had systems that finished all the benchmarks safely without crashing. The rest had at least one failure. Stability is the name of the game here and these four gentlemen showed that they got that spot-on.